BIS CHAP 5 Lecture Notes 5

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

MIS infrastructure, which includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets. A solid MIS infrastructure can reduce costs, improve productivity, optimize business operations, generate growth, and increase profitability.

Hardware consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system

Software is the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks

A network is a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate

Specific form of network infrastructure:

 A client is a computer designed to request information from a server.  A server is a computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests. A good way to understand this is when someone uses a web browser (this would be the client) to access a website (this would be a server that would respond with the web page being requested by the client).

An enterprise architect is a person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business. Firms employ enterprise architects to help manage change and dynamically update MIS infrastructure.

 Supporting operations: Information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

 Supporting change: Agile MIS infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals.

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

 Supporting the environment: Sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.

A/ SUPPORTING OPERATIONS: INFORMATION MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

To support continuous business operations, an information infrastructure provides three primary elements:

 Backup and recovery plan

 Disaster recovery plan

 Business continuity plan

A backup is an exact copy of a system’s information. Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup. (If the company deals with large volumes of critical information, it will require daily, perhaps hourly, backups to storage servers. If it relies on small amounts of noncritical, then it might require only weekly backups to external hard drives or thumb drives. A company that backs up on a weekly basis is taking the risk that, if a system crash occurs, it could lose a week’s worth of work)

Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service. For example, fault tolerance enables a business to support continuous business operations if there is a power failure or flood.

Failover, a specific type of fault tolerance, occurs when a redundant storage server offers an exact replica of the real-time data, and if the primary server crashes, the users are automatically directed to the secondary server or backup server. This is a high-speed and high-cost method of backup and recovery.

Failback occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations, taking over from the secondary server.

a disaster recovery plan, which is a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster. This plan includes such factors as which files and systems need to have backups and their corresponding frequency and methods along with the strategic location of the storage in a separate physical site that is geographically dispersed.

A hot site is a separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business. A cold site is a separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is a place where employees can move after a disaster. A warm site is a separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration

A disaster recovery plan usually has a disaster recovery cost curve to support it. A disaster recovery cost curve charts (1) the cost to the company of the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the company of recovering from a disaster over time.

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

B/ SUPPORTING CHANGE: AGILE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
The characteristics of agile MIS infrastructures can help ensure that your systems can meet and perform under any unexpected or unplanned changes

Accessibility

Accessibility refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system

Top-level MIS employees require administrator acces s : unrestricted access to the entire system. Administrator access can perform functions such as resetting passwords, deleting accounts, and shutting down entire systems

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. The web accessibility initiative (WAI) brings together people from industry, disability organizations, government, and research labs from around the world to develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities, including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. The goal of WAI is to allow people to access the full potential of the web, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally. For example, Apple includes screen magnification and VoiceOver on its iPhone, iPad, and iPod, which allows the blind and visually impaired to use the devices.

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

Availability

In a 24/7/365 ebusiness environment, business professionals need to use their systems whenever they want from wherever they want. Availability refers to the time frames when the system is operational. A system is called unavailable when it is not operating and cannot be used. High availability occurs when

a system is continuously operational at all times.
Maintainability

Maintainability (or flexibility) refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes. Maintainability helps to measure how quickly and effectively a system can be changed or repaired after a failure. For example, when starting a small business, you might not consider that you will have global customers, a common mistake.

Portability

Portability refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems. Apple’s iTunes is readily available to users of Mac computers and PC computers, smart phones, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and so on. It is also a portable application.

Reliability

Reliability (or accuracy) ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Inaccuracy can occur for many reasons, from the incorrect entry of information to the corruption of information during transmissions.

A vulnerability is a system weakness, such as a password that is never changed or a system left on while an employee goes to lunch, that can be exploited by a threat.

Performance measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction. Performance is a key component of scalability as systems that can’t scale suffer from performance issues. Just imagine your college’s content management system suddenly taking five minutes to return a page after a button is pushed. Now imagine if this occurs during your midterm exam and you miss the two-hour deadline because the system is so slow.

Capacity represents the maximum throughput a system can deliver; for example, the capacity of a hard drive represents its size or volume. Capacity planning determines future environmental infrastructure requirements to ensure high-quality system performance. If a company purchases connectivity software that is outdated or too slow to meet demand, its employees will waste a great deal of time waiting for systems to respond to user requests. It is cheaper for a company to design and implement agile infrastructure that envisions growth requirements than to update all the equipment after the system is already operational. If a company with 100 workers merges with another company and suddenly 400 people are using the system, performance time could suffer.

Usability

Usability is the degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use. Providing hints, tips, shortcuts, and instructions for any system, regardless of its ease of use, is recommended. Apple understood the importance of usability when it designed the first iPod. One of the iPod’s initial

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

Ewaste refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices. Ewaste includes CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, printer cartridges, cell phones, iPods, external hard drives, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, microwaves, and so on.

An upcycle reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product.

Sustainable MIS disposal refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle. It ensures that ewaste does not end up in landfills, causing environmental issues. A single computer contains more than 700 chemicals; some are toxic, such as mercury, lead, and cadmium. If a computer ends up in a landfill, the toxic substances it contains can leach into our land, water, and air. Recycling costs from $ to $50 for a monitor or computer.

Increased Energy Consumption

Energy consumption is the amount of energy consumed by business processes and systems. Huge increases in technology use have greatly amplified energy consumption. The energy consumed by a computer is estimated to produce as much as 10 percent of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by an automobile.

Increased Carbon Emissions

Additional temperature increases are projected over the next 100 years, with serious consequences for Earth’s environment, if carbon emissions, including the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide produced by business processes and systems, are not reduced.

C/ SUPPORTING THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

Grid Computing

Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal.. With grid computing, a problem is broken into pieces and distributed to many machines, allowing faster processing than could occur with a single system. Computers typically use less than 25 percent of their processing power, leaving more than 75 percent available for other tasks.

Solving the Energy Issue with Smart Grids A smart grid delivers electricity using two-way digital technology. It is meant to solve the problem of the world’s outdated electrical grid, making it more efficient and reliable by adding the ability to monitor, analyze, and control the transmission of power remotely. The current U. power grid is said to have outlived its life expectancy by as much as 30 years. Smart grids provide users with real-time usage monitoring, allowing them to choose off-peak times for noncritical or less urgent applications or processes.

Virtualized Computing

Virtualization creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device. A good analogy is a computer printer. In the past, you had to purchase a fax machine, copy machine, answering machine, and computer printer separately. This was expensive, required enough energy to run four machines, and created additional amounts of ewaste. Today, you can buy a virtualized computer printer that functions as a fax machine, answering machine, and copy machine all on one physical machine, thereby reducing costs, power requirements, and ewaste.

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

storage virtualization combines multiple network storage devices so they appear to be a single storage device.

 Network virtualization combines networks by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned in real time to a specific device.

 Server virtualization combines the physical resources, such as servers, processors, and operating systems, from the applications. (This is the most common form, and typically, when you hear the term virtualization, you can assume server virtualization.)

Virtualization is also one of the easiest and quickest ways to achieve a sustainable MIS infrastructure because it reduces power consumption and requires less equipment that needs to be manufactured, maintained, and later disposed of safely. Managers no longer have to assign servers, storage, or network capacity permanently to single applications. Instead, they can assign the hardware resources when and where they are needed, achieving the availability, flexibility, and scalability a company needs to thrive and grow.

System virtualization is the ability to present the resources of a single computer as if it is a collection of separate computers (“virtual machines”), each with its own virtual CPUs, network interfaces, storage, and operating system.

Ways for Data Centers to Become Sustainable

Cloud Computing

cloud computing stores, manages, and processes data and applications over the Internet rather than on a personal computer or server. Cloud computing offers new ways to store, access, process, and analyze information and connect people and resources from any location in the world an Internet connection is available.

Multi-tenancy in the cloud means that a single instance of a system serves multiple customers. In the cloud, each customer is called a tenant, and multiple tenants can access the same system. Multi-tenancy helps reduce operational costs associated with implementing large systems because the costs are dispersed across many tenants as opposed to single tenancy, in which each customer or tenant must purchase and maintain an individual system.

A noisy neighbor refers to a multi-tenancy co-tenant that monopolizes bandwidth, servers, CPUs, and other resources that cause network performance issues. The noisy neighbor effect occurs when one

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a nonprofit organization that promotes research into best practices for securing cloud computing and cloud delivery models. CSA offers tools, documentation, and reports on cloud computing services, security education, and security best practices for implementing cloud models. A cloud audit creates a standard way for cloud providers to simplify the process of gathering audit data and communicate how they address security, governance, and compliance.

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud includes two or more private, public, or community clouds, but each cloud remains separate and is only linked by technology that enables data and application portability. For example, a company might use a private cloud for critical applications that maintain sensitive data and a public cloud for nonsensitive data applications.

Cloud bursting is an application runs in a private cloud or data center and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes.

Hybrid cloud storage uses both on-site and off-site resources to store corporate data. With a hybrid cloud storage frequently used data is stored on-site, while inactive data is stored in off-site in the cloud

UTILITY COMPUTING

Utility computing offers a pay-per-use revenue model similar to a metered service such as gas or electricity.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers hardware networking capabilities, including the use of servers, networking, and storage, over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model.

IaaS offers a cost-effective solution for companies that need their computing resources to grow and shrink as business demand changes. This is known as dynamic scaling, which means the MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers backup services that use cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by disaster.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers applications over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model. Before its introduction, companies often spent huge amounts of money implementing and customizing specialized applications to satisfy their business requirements. Many of these applications were difficult to implement, expensive to maintain, and challenging to use. Usability was one of the biggest drivers for creating interest in and success for cloud computing service providers. SaaS offers a number of advantages; the most obvious is tremendous cost savings. The software is priced on a per-use basis with no up-front costs, so companies get the immediate benefit of reducing capital expenditures. They also get the added benefits of scalability and flexibility to test new software on a rental basis.

Salesforce is one of the most popular SaaS providers. It built and delivered a sales automation application, suitable for the typical salesperson, which automates functions such as tracking sales leads and prospects and forecasting. Tapping the power of SaaS can provide access to a large-scale, secure

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

infrastructure, along with any needed support, which is especially valuable for a start-up or small company with few financial resources. A few SaaS extensions include:

 Data as a Service (DaaS ) facilitates the accessibility of business-critical data in a timely, secure, and affordable manner. DaaS depends on the principle that specified, useful data can be supplied to users on demand, irrespective of any organizational or geographical separation between consumers and providers.

 Security as a Service (SaaS) involves applications such as anti-virus software delivered over the Internet with constant virus definition updates that are not reliant on user compliance. Security as a Service is sometimes referred to as cloud security. Security as a Service provides top security expertise that is traditionally better than can be found in an organization. Security as a Service providers include Cisco, McAfee, and Symantec.

 Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offers enterprise communication and collaboration services over the Internet such as instant messaging systems, online meetings, and video conferencing.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) supports the deployment of entire systems, including hardware, networking, and applications, using a pay-per-use revenue model. PaaS is a perfect solution for a business because it passes on to the service provider the headache and challenges of buying, managing, and maintaining web development software.

PaaS helps companies minimize operational costs and increase productivity by providing all the following without up-front investment:

 Increased security.

 Access to information anywhere and anytime.

 Centralized information management.

 Easy collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers

 Increased speed to market with significantly less cost.

Big Data as a Service (BDaaS ) offers a cloud-based Big Data service to help organizations analyze massive amounts of data to solve business dilemmas. BDaaS is a somewhat nebulous term often used to describe a wide variety of outsourcing of various Big Data functions to the cloud. This can range from the supply of data, to the supply of analytical tools with which to interrogate the data (often through a web dashboard or control panel), to carrying out the actual analysis and providing reports